Ironically enough, I made this post with the assumption that I end up ridiculed and I am quite happy to be wrong about that.
You in depth explanation of the BB makes so much more sense to me than what the common short hand used in day to day language. The BB is the name given to the stage at which proto matter became matter. Gotcha. It went from a simple sub atom existence into the age of atoms. What's the next age? Who knows.
Anyways I'm going to jump off of that point right into a little biology. It is my understanding that when you look at the ME events in the fossil record, you notice that simpler life forms have an easier time adapting, and thus adapt to changing conditions much faster than more complex organisms, and that's without mentioning extremophiles.
The last remnants of life on earth will be the same ones that saw the beginning.
So the big crunch would be all matter breaking down into proto matter. Adjacent to many many many other crunches in the multiverse soup, condenses, and...
BOOM! New universe!
A finite universe to me would be like living in a video game. A simulation with programmed limits and limits to the program. I'm too much of an atheist, I have a hard time accepting the universe as anything other than infinite.
With this model in mind there's no reason that there isn't multiverses within multiverses. That's quantum foam as far as I understand the theory. The symmetry of scale. And if you picture a Venn diagram of the sciences that describes our universe, the white space is quantum inside and outside. And then you can make all kinds of Venn diagrams in the white spaces to describe other universes' sciences, and no 2 have to be alike.